Since we began work on this issue, I've had an image in my mind that I have tried to force on the team in some way, from our cover artist to our event planner—and it has, like many of my ideas, found its rightful place in my editor's note. The image is of a stool on a stage in the spotlight: ubiquitous and bare-bones tools of the performer, the stand-up comedian, the singer-songwriter, the one-man-show-er. I say the image has found its rightful place here because this note is the time I get on the stage and give you my monologue.
As you can already tell, there is a lot of performance in the editor's note, but maybe there is some in the editor's work too. There certainly is in the work of a critic who assesses the work of a performer. Performance lives in the space between someone and our knowledge of them, and in trying to understand and decode a performance, we are enacting our own: a performance of insight.
While editing the pieces for this issue, I went to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto and watched a video installation by Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi tucked away in a stairwell. In the video, titled Suspension, we see gymnasts, all women of colour, in the moments right before starting their routines. I immediately thought of performance, but what’s so striking is that these moments seem thoroughly unperformed, just genuine rituals belonging to the gymnasts: murmuring to themselves, maybe in prayer; bouncing from one foot to the other, maybe preparing their bodies for lightness. But mostly they stare ahead, maybe looking at the other corner of the mat, maybe visualizing the perfect performance. Unlike sports, we don’t usually see the actor offstage before they walk into the lights, or on set right before action is called. But we can imagine it. It’s actually as essential to the performance as the performance itself: our fantasies of the performer when they call cut, or the curtain falls.
The brilliant pieces in this issue probe this moment, the gap between the self and the character. The actress who exorcises something deep and dark, that, unleashed in real life, would come at great social cost, but pays dividends onscreen. Or the performances that barely veil the actor’s true feelings: exhaustion, indifference, irritation. Or the mysterious, endearing performance of dogs. Or the performance of the writer, the self-conscious negotiations of your persona when you pitch and are rejected and revise and refine, until you come across more clearly.
Like our cover art so strikingly renders: whenever we leave the house, we are wearing masks of ourselves, maybe in an effort to hide, but there is vulnerability in this performance too. Through this facade, we are showing the world who we are trying, sometimes desperately, to be. And although it's up to others to deem if we are pulling it off, there is satisfaction in the bravery it takes to take the stage.
There isn't a curtain to come down or a band to play me out at the end of this note. But I'll take a kind of bow here anyway, ever grateful that you come to see our show and watch us perform.
—Gabrielle Marceau
Editor-in-Chief, In The Mood Magazine